Exposure

by Alan Russell

  “How did he put his hooks into you?”

  “I don’t like that phrasing.”

  “How did you begin working for him?”

  “Ari asked me to do a minor favor. I complied.”

  “The favors escalated?”

  “I helped out several times.”

  “Doing what?”

  She shook her head. “No details.”

  “How did this Ari contact you?”

  “He called me here on my personal line.”

  “And how did you contact him?”

  “I didn’t. The communication was one-way. As I told you, I really didn’t do too much work for them.”

  “Did you meet or talk with anyone besides Ari?”

  “His brother Yitzhak.”

  “Who was also with the Mossad?”

  A nod.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Yitzhak had also worked with Uncle Hi.” A moment later, as if to rebut her own doubts, she added with not a little defensiveness, “The brothers always spoke Hebrew to one another.”

  “Do you know Hebrew?”

  “A few words.”

  “Whom did you give my number to?”

  “Ari.”

  “When did he call you?”

  “Last night. He told me how he and Yitzhak had tried to scare you, and that while you were resisting, things got out of hand. They were only protecting me, you know.”

  “Why did you need protecting?”

  “They knew I was upset. The week before I had told them not to contact me anymore, that I was through with being their bat leveyha—their female agent.”

  It was clear that Lanie believed everything she said. But she was omitting more than she was admitting.

  “By telling me everything,” he said, “it would make it easier for me to help you.”

  “I don’t want your help. You’re in this for the money. You are not Gregory Peck and this isn’t Roman Holiday.”

  “Peck was the reporter,” Graham said. “Eddie Albert was the photographer.”

  In the movie, Peck had gone from being the opportunistic journalist to the altruistic person, in the end sacrificing his big story. Audrey Hepburn had portrayed a princess playing hooky from her onerous responsibilities. Graham suspected that like the princess, Lanie had recently tried to escape the fishbowl. But she hadn’t experienced a happy ending like Hepburn.

  “‘Rome, by all means, Rome,’ ” quoted Lanie. “‘I will cherish my visit here in memory as long as I live.’ ”

  “It’s a classic film.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you enjoyed movies.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Your profession. It throws dirt and grime and worse on the film industry.”

  “That’s not how celebrity photographers look at our work. I think of Hollywood as the great and powerful Oz. It does special effects wonderfully. It hides behind spectacular veneers. It blusters and it blows and it poses. Sometimes I shoot those things. But every so often it needs a Toto like me pulling its curtain back.”

  “Toto, huh?”

  “It was either that or admit I lack a brain, a heart, or courage.”

  Wistfully, she said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Their hands reconnected, and then their bodies. They sidled up next to each other. Lanie covered up a yawn. She was clearly exhausted. It was a good time to go for the jugular, thought Graham. People who are tired make mistakes. Graham needed to know more about her role as a sayan, and wanted to ask about the brothers. But instead of prodding her with more questions, Graham asked, “Is there any way I can sack out in an open bed tonight?”

  She said, “How about this one?”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-NINE

  They were still holding each other, fast asleep, when the phone rang.

  “Don’t answer it,” Graham said.

  “But what if it’s—”

  “We know who it is.” He reached over her and disconnected the phone.

  Both were too tired to talk anymore. They fell back into each other’s arms and then fell asleep.

  Later, Graham awoke to Lanie’s moving about the room. She was already dressed.

  “Keep sleeping,” she said.

  “I’d rather look at you.”

  “You’re not usually this nice this early in the morning, are you?”

  “Not usually.”

  “Good.”

  “Is it possible,” asked Graham, “that we can meet for a late dinner?”

  Lanie hesitated, and Graham was annoyed to realize he wasn’t breathing while waiting for her answer.

  “I don’t mean to be pushy,” he said. “I know last night was a . . . fluke. But we still haven’t finished our—”

  “Business,” she said, a frown on her face.

  “I was going to say conversation.”

  She appeared to like his word better, but still wavered. “I don’t know if dinner will work. It’s likely I’ll be on the set until very late.”

  “The sooner we talk, the better. I’ll hand you the memory card tonight, and if you want me to sign that contract right now, I will. It’s not about money anymore.”

  “My business manager says that whenever anyone says those words, I should run away.”

  “That’s probably good advice.”

  “What is it about?”

  “I don’t know. But what you told me last night didn’t make me feel a heck of a lot better.”

  “But everything ties into the Mossad. It all fits.”

  “Maybe that’s why I don’t feel better.”

  “That story about your being blackmailed—that was true?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Her apology took Graham aback. He didn’t deserve her sympathy, but then she didn’t know what he had done.

  “I’ll call you tonight sometime between seven and eight,” she said. “By then I should know whether dinner’s possible.”

  “You need a ride to the studio?” Graham asked.

  She shook her head. “Limo’s waiting.”

  “Silly me.”

  “Security knows you’re here. My part of the Grove doesn’t get cleaned until the afternoon, so you shouldn’t be bothered. If you want to linger, it would be best if you used the guesthouse.”

  “Should I sneak out there and muss up one of the beds to make it look as if that’s where I slept?”

  “Why? Are you afraid your reputation might be sullied?”

  “Mine is beyond redemption.”

  “You saved my life. That must count for something in some ledger. I know I won’t forget it soon.”

  “Is that what last night was about?”

  Lanie shook her head, and then leaned close to him. She didn’t kiss Graham, just put her middle and index fingers on his cheek and lightly touched him.

  “Bring a hat tonight,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “To cover your face. You always have to watch out for the paparazzi.”

  It was a stupid time to be feeling goofy about someone. Graham knew he was being a fool if he thought he had a chance at a relationship with someone like Lanie. A proper suitor for her would be royalty, or a billionaire, or an artistic genius. Or the future president of the United States.

  With the likes of him, she was slumming. Lanie would realize their one night together was a mistake. She had told him last night wasn’t a mercy fuck, but he found that hard to believe. He needed a clear head, but she played on his mind. He kept flashing back to their making love. Their heat had been so intense. Just thinking about it made him feel echoes of it on his forehead, and neck, and groin. Her skin was toned, but soft and fem
inine. She had kept surprising him; in word, in thought, and in bed.

  Graham was feeling things he hadn’t felt in years. He didn’t expect things would ever be the same again, but it was still nice to be touched by sunshine.

  There was work to be done, though.

  Before leaving, he stopped by the garage. He didn’t look at the other cars housed there, just went directly to the Jaguar rental.

  When Graham had raced away with a comatose Lanie as passenger, he’d had to move the seat back. Lanie was a half foot shorter than he was. The driver’s seat would have been positioned for someone of her stature.

  There didn’t seem to be any good reason why the Jaguar hadn’t been returned to the rental agency. Lanie had enough money to not worry about its running meter, but there was staff aplenty to see to its return. There had to be an explanation for its being housed in her garage.

  The Jaguar was unlocked. Graham carefully went through its interior. The rental agreement was still in the glove compartment. That was the only evidence of human occupation. The rest of the car was so clean he barely came away with dust.

  He started an inch-by-inch search of the exterior of the car. Because he began with the front bumper, it wasn’t long before he noticed the scrapes and scratches. They extended along the right side of the bumper, across the grille, and up the hood. The right headlight was cracked in several spots, but the glass had remained intact. Someone had rubbed down the scrapes, applying a coat of wax that all but made them blend in with the car. When Graham had driven the car, he had never noticed that it had been in an accident.

  Graham was willing to bet that no police report had been filed.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  Graham knew that Ran had no shortage of uniforms in his closet. The UPS and FedEx outfits were his standards, but he had costumes for every occasion.

  “Maintenance man,” Graham said, “for my apartment.”

  “I got blue polyester or tan polyester. The blue polyester has the name of Roy, and I think the tan has Alberto.”

  “I think the guys at my place wear blue.”

  “Roy it is.”

  “In that case, I suppose I should call you Ray.”

  “And I’ll just stay with your usual standard of calling you asshole.”

  “Can’t improve upon a classic.”

  “The surprise isn’t that someone wants to kill you,” Ran said. “The surprise is that there isn’t a line.”

  They met at a prearranged spot in a Vons supermarket parking lot and drove in Ran’s car over to Graham’s apartment. Graham opened a bag and pulled out two exit signs and two motion detectors. “You ever do camera trap photography before?”

  “A little. But I’m not Mr. Gadget like you.”

  “I got into it after watching a nature show where some researchers and biologists were using an infrared system between a transmitter and receiver to photograph any animals crossing the beam. The animal tripped off the system just by walking across the infrared beam. I figured what worked for the four-legged would work even better with the two-legged.”

  He tapped an exit sign and motion detector. “These are the fronts for our transmitters and receivers. Everything is already in place. I’ll go first. I already have motion detectors in the front and back, so it’s just going to be a matter of changing the casings. After I get back, you can be the officious maintenance man replacing the exit signs around the property. On the front side of my apartment is an exit sign about sixty feet away. It’s a straight line between the sign and the motion detector. The back of my apartment faces the garage. That’s where another exit sign is. It’s about eighty feet off.”

  Ran looked dubious. “Where do you get the juice to operate these things?”

  “They’re self-contained. Each has two C batteries.”

  “If your Buck Rogers beam gets tripped too often, you’ll go through the memory card.”

  “Not likely,” Graham said. “It can store thousands of shots, and the program is designed to key into your game of choice. It doesn’t matter if a biologist is out to shoot a mouse or an elephant, because he can specify the range of the beam. I’ve set it up so that anything approaching the front or back of my apartment will break the active infrared beam and get nailed on film.”

  “Golly gee, Batman,” said Ran.

  “All you have to do is replace the exit signs without getting electrocuted.”

  “I might be able to do that. Seems to me you forgot one detail, though. Your pictures might come out during the day, but you’ll get shitty shots at night.”

  Graham shook his head. “The sign illuminates. So does the motion detector. Between the two of them, the area around my apartment should get some half-decent lighting. Just make sure the camera end of the garage exit sign is pointed toward the back of my apartment. You don’t have to worry about the one in front. Just set it up as is.”

  “What kind of shots you get out of these things?”

  “Better than your average DMV shot.”

  “‘That’ll do, pig,’ ” he said, ‘that’ll do.’ ”

  “Thank you, Farmer Hoggett.”

  Graham had Ran circle the area twice before parking out of sight down the street. He approached his own apartment cautiously, surveying the area with professional eyes. Graham had done enough surveillance to know how it was done, and how many ways it could be done.

  Before having Ran work on the motion detectors, he did a quick inspection of his apartment. Nothing looked as if it had been touched. Graham changed that. He turned on some lights, opened shades, threw back the covers, and tossed the mail on a table. If someone was checking up on him, he wanted to make it appear he was back at the apartment again. That might bring them in for a closer look.

  It might have been his own apartment, but he still felt uneasy. His fenced-in back porch allowed him some privacy, but on the front stoop he was exposed. He used his back to shield what he was doing, and hoped that if anyone was looking they would think he was replacing the light in the motion detector.

  Even the notion that someone could be looking made him self-conscious. Finishing was a relief. He walked down the street and found Ran reclined on the hood of the car catching some rays.

  Graham tapped him on his work shirt. “All set for you, Roy,” he said.

  Ran stretched, slid off the hood, and reached inside the car for his work belt and a stepladder. He wrapped the belt around himself and arched an eyebrow in Graham’s direction.

  “Perfect,” said Graham. “Other people wouldn’t think to have their butt crack showing, but damn if you didn’t go the extra yard, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating that detail by much.”

  “Glad you noticed.”

  While Ran worked, Graham read from a book he had picked up that morning. By Way of Deception was Colonel Victor Ostrovsky’s account of his time as a Mossad agent. It was like many kiss-and-tell memoirs Graham had read: part bitter, part informative, and part braggadocio. What interested him most was Ostrovsky’s section on the sayanim. It was much as Lanie had described. Before doing their recruiting, the Mossad made sure that potential sayanim were one hundred percent Jewish. No Israeli citizen was a sayan—that would be too obvious. The Mossad used a gathering officer—a katsa—to manage his stable of sayanim. The katsa kept in regular contact with his helpers. By using the volunteers, the Mossad was able to supplement its rather meager, at least by international spy standards, workforce.

  Ostrovsky described various manipulation and enforcement tactics used by the Mossad. One assassination scenario Ostrovsky related struck close to home with Graham. He described how Israeli agents had performed a hit by funneling vodka down the throat of an unconscious target, and then sending the “inebriate” over a cliff in a flaming car.

  Reading about his own brush with death, Graham looked around, then locked the car d
oors. That still didn’t stop him from jumping in his seat when Ran tapped on the car’s window.

  “How did it go?” Graham asked.

  “No problem. It was hard to get away, though.”

  “What happened?”

  “Your next-door neighbor, an old lady, came out and saw me working. She had a whole list of things she wanted me to do. I promised I’d be back a little later. Only thing that was harder to shake was her dog. That little bastard thought my leg was his love connection.”

  “His name’s Rex in case you want to give him a call sometime.”

  “You’re the one who will probably be calling him something. He was visiting your doorstep when I left. I’m hoping we don’t end up with too long of a documentary detailing his stay.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s about the size of it. He was definitely tripping your infrared beam. Yeah, it was almost like the little bastard knew what he was doing. He kept positioning his backside to the camera. He was really doing a job of cracking you a smile.”

  “If the pictures come out, I’ll be sure to get you a framed copy.”

  “I’d like that,” Ran said. “I really would.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  Blackwell flipped through the news stations. It was laughable, really. The so-called breaking news was mostly old hat. The real news of the world rarely aired.

  He knew that information was power, but he also knew that information was like gold. It needed to be mined, and dredged, and sifted before the riches emerged. No one panned for gold these days. Gold-mining operations were huge operations with expensive equipment, and sluices, and power hoses. Tons of rock and earth had to be moved before they would yield minuscule quantities of gold. Mother lodes were ever elusive.

  That’s how it was with most treasure. You knew it was there, but you couldn’t get to it. Blackwell had thought long and hard on how he could mine that gold. To draw on those riches, he needed to be a part of the elite that was handed the earth’s wealth every day. They were given all of the news that those in power believed was not fit to print, were handed an opportunity for riches by having a subscription to the most informative newspaper on the planet, a paper published every day but Sunday. Insiders called the President’s Daily Brief “the most expensive, least circulated, newspaper in the world.” On any given day, it had a readership of less than fifteen people. It was a paper without bylines; its editorial staff consisted of the sixteen thousand employees of the CIA and their many contacts throughout the world. To get a copy of the PDB, you had to be one of the very select: the president and the vice president, the secretary of state and the attorney general, the national security advisor, and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Being a member of Capitol Hill didn’t get you a subscription; only the ranking members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence received copies.